Thursday, October 29, 2015

A Note From the Host of the Musiquarium

Chris Hornbostel sent me this e-mail last week, and I wanted to share it with you. This is pretty fantastic.

The Capitol Theater was a 3200-seat music venue in Passaic, New Jersey. It operated from the early 1970s through the mid 1980s. It was closed up then, and was demolished in 1991. It's a shopping center now.In its time, though, it was a must-visit tour stop on the way to or from NYC and Boston for pretty much anyone touring the eastern seaboard. Everyone played the Capitol. Rock, pop, soul, blues, and jazz.What's also cool is that in the mid 1970s, they had a closed circuit TV system there. While you were in the bathroom, hanging with friends in the lobby, buying beer, or finding weed in the stairwells, there were TV sets that showed the concert as it happened for you. The Capitol used multiple cameramen with full-professional rigs to film their shows. They used state of the art (then) sound mixing gear. For most shows, there was a producer in a booth somewhere making cuts from one camera angle to another, the way you'd see on a concert filmed for television. And here's the great thing: even though the Capitol Theater is no more, people have rescued an awful lot of the black and white and color footage of concerts shot there. And it's on Youtube.If you go to Youtube, enter Capitol Theater Full Concert, and go nuts. Bruce, Fleetwood Mac, The Clash, Talking Heads, REM, The Dead, etc. etc.

I've been listening to concerts all week, and they've been absolutely stunning.